View of Haarlem with Bleaching Grounds , by Jacob van Ruisdael, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at Los Angeles’ ADUs, electrical transformer manufacturing, gas turbine power plants, how water in the Colorado River is used, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. No essay this week, but I have a very lon...

One does not need a doctorate in mathematics to split 12 eager trivia buffs into two competitive teams. But consider that each person arrives with unique strengths and liabilities: One may be a geography obsessive with no ear for music, another could be a naturalist who doesn’t own a television, and another could be a cinephile who never reads. Balancing traits between two camps becomes a lot… Source One does not need a doctorate in mathematics to split 12 eager trivia buffs into two comp...

See, I told you I’d get tuckered out writing about vehicles and be back to protocols soon enough. “The internet is forever” is a great warning against the inability to unshare content, but completely irrelevant in regard to linkrot and long term preservation. Links I save or share here often are offline or significantly altered on a scale of months or years, much less over the course of decades. Http is efficient; “go get that file from that server” is fast, but does a rather poor job ...

poems embody Nature, of seasons (for)ever- changing; living in time. poems embody Nature, of seasons (for)ever- changing; living in time. poems embody Nature, of seasons (for)ever- changing; living in time.

I caught wind of the news that MacStories is back posting on X, the “everything platform”, and that seems to have caused some backlash. I am not a reader of MacStories (because tools are tools and I don’t read about new computers the same way I don’t read about new washing machines) and I’m also not on X. So why do I even care about this news? Well, the short answer is that I don’t. But after the move (I guess because of the backlash?) Federico Viticci, MacStories’ Founder, posted ...

The BOE TV070WXM-TV0 LCD used in the original Steam Deck can be had for around $30. It's a serviceable 7" touchscreen with 400 nits of brightness and a resolution of 1280x800 (for a sharp 216 ppi). The specs are a lot nicer than the Pi 7" Touch Display , which costs twice as much, with giant bezels and half the resolution! Until today, the Steam Deck LCD didn't work with a Raspberry Pi. But the folks at Scandent were trying to standardize on a mass-market touchscreen for one of the...

I would be very grateful for pointers to other recent empirical studies of the impact of AI on programming education that are more rigorous than the gushing slop being tossed around on LinkedIn. I’d be particularly grateful for studies that show negative or neutral results. download the .bib file @article{Abdulla2024, title = {Using ChatGPT in Teaching Computer Programming and Studying its Impact on Students Performance}, volume = {22}, ISSN = {1479-4403}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/...

TL;DR Why building an app over the weekend isn't the same as building enterprise software I’ve noticed an interesting gap opening up over the last six months. It isn’t really a gap in technology. It’s a gap in what different people think software engineering actually is. The conversation usually starts the same way. A non-techie, maybe an executive, tells me about something they’ve built over the weekend. Sometimes it’s a chatbot. Sometimes it’s an internal workflow. Sometimes i...

IBM employed 264,300 people across IBM and its wholly owned subsidiaries at December 31, 2025, down from 270,300 a year earlier. The company reported $67.5 billion in 2025 revenue with a smaller workforce than in any of the three prior years. This post collects the verified workforce numbers IBM published in its 2025 Annual Report, its 2026 proxy statement, and its own responsible business data summary. IBM Employee Statistics 2026 264,300 Employees at IBM and wholly owned subsidiaries, ...

This is part 8 in a series of posts on writing concurrent network servers. In this part, we'll switch to Go and see how it tackles the challenges described earlier in the series. All posts in the series: Part 1 - Introduction Part 2 - Threads Part 3 - Event-driven Part 4 - libuv Part 5 - Redis case study Part 6 - Callbacks, Promises and async/await Part 7 - Rust Part 8 - Go (this part) This post assumes a basic familiarity with the Go programming language. Sequential ...

Introduction In the Livelymerge project, Dan Ingalls, Peter van Hardenberg, and I (Alex Warth) are building a Lively Kernel-like system whose heap is an Automerge document. (See the earlier notes in this series for the object model and support for local state .) One of the challenges I listed at the start of this series was performance : can programs whose objects live in an Automerge document run fast enough for authentic use? For a while the answer was no. Here’s the example th...

I try not to give a lot of prescriptive advice about working in tech companies 1 . There are many ways to be successful, and every company works differently. If you’re shipping projects and your management chain is happy, it doesn’t really matter how you’ve accomplished it. However, there’s one thing that I do think is solid advice: you should never be angry at work . Anger in the workplace Anger in the workplace is toxic. An angry colleague immediately becomes a new problem to b...

Samuel Yeboah , Francesco Di Chiara and Mingliang Liu Today, Netflix runs two Flink autoscalers. That is exactly one more than we want. We built the first one in-house years ago, when there was no mature option suited to our platform. The second came from the Apache Flink community, and it can scale workloads our homegrown system was never designed for. We now run both in production and are steadily converging on the open-source one. Along the way we learned some hard lessons about metrics, c...

Modern computer systems are quite fascinating. They are highly complex, run a lot of software, and their performance characteristics are hard or impossible to predict. Earlier this year, I gave a lecture on benchmarking, which for lack of generic and always-applicable advice, I started with a brainstorming session about its pitfalls. Since systems have become so complex that we rarely know what happens exactly. We are prone to simply guess what’s going on. Or rather, we should hypothesize a...

The implicit promise of modernity is: we have to work really hard for a few centuries, but eventually we’ll get to the Star Trek future where we’ve automated all the drudgery, and all work is meaningful, heroic, and dignifies the spirit. We will be artists, scholars, captains of the starship Enterprise , etc. There’s a few problems with this idea: “Drudgery” and “meaningful work” are in the same complexity class, so the technology to automates the former also automates th...

So one of the things I've been trying to do as part of my journey to lose weight and get fit is sort my diet out. As the saying goes, "you can't out-train a poor diet" . And the worst part of my diet is definitely snacking in the evening. The routing generally goes: Have dinner. Put the kids to bed and settle down with my wife on the couch. Crave snacks out of habit. Get snacks and eat them! I'm the type of person who finds an arbitrary thing to aim for very motivating. It's n...

0.0 Context Setting Friday, 21 August 2026 in Portland Oregon where the timer continues to tick down to Skynet Sentience day. A busy day today: the 9am show, and then a couple calls, along with making sure that I get some proposals and overviews out to people. 0.1 Events That’s a wrap on How People Work, Live! ... with Marcin Wichary. You can go watch the recording now , or you can look at the playlist , or even (deep breath) subscribe to my channel . Next up! How People Work,...

First launch of Skyroot’s Vikram-1 rocket from ISRO’s Sriharikota launch complex. Images: Skyroot Aerospace The successful launch of Skyroot Aerospace’s small Vikram-1 rocket on July 18 , sans the mixed outcome for payloads , has been hailed as a revolutionary launch success for India by the company, ISRO, the Indian government, various media outlets, industry executives, and people at large. That it’s rare globally to achieve orbit on first attempt bolstered said outlook and emot...

I’ve only ever programmed DIP EEPROMs with my XGecu T48 , and entirely for retrocomputers of the 8 and 16-bit variety. But I wanted to revive an old motherboard with a dead BIOS chip, so I sourced a replacement and programmed it. The chip in question is a SST39SF040, an EEPROM in a PLCC package. This necessitated buying a carrier adaptor from AliExpress to allow the T48 to interface with it: For those with a keen eye, yes, that’s a USB cable from an old 250 MB Iomega Zip drive! All th...

In the UK August is known in the press as "silly season" (because nothing of note happens, so the only stories published are nonsense ones). Turns out this doesn’t apply to the world of data and AI blog posts - still over 50 interesting ones for me to share with you this month. In the UK August is known in the press as "silly season" (because nothing of note happens, so the only stories published are nonsense ones). Turns out this doesn’t apply to the world of data and AI blog posts - s...

RENO, Nev. (August 20, 2026) — Shield AI, the defense-tech company building the world’s best AI pilots and next-generation aircraft, today announced its X-BAT has been named the Official Autonomous Aircraft of the Army-Navy Game presented by USAA, one of the most storied rivalries in American sports. Shield AI also joins as an Associate Sponsor of America’s Game. The 127th meeting of the United States Military Academy at West Point’s Army Black Knights and the United States Naval Academy...

Rust Glancer Aug 21, 2026 Rust Glancer , a functional LSP server for Rust which uses two orders of magnitude less RAM, is incredibly cool. Go check it out! This post started as a comment on lobste.rs, but I figured it out that it’s better to publish it somewhat more prominently. Don’t expect polished writing though! Some thoughts: rust-analyzer uses rowan for syntax tree representation Yeah, rowan is garbage :P I was really thinking about incremental parsing, i...

Internet à moda antiga: conheça a indie web, onde as pessoas ainda fazem seus próprios sites Also posted on IndieNews Internet à moda antiga: conheça a indie web, onde as pessoas ainda fazem seus próprios sites Also posted on IndieNews Internet à moda antiga: conheça a indie web, onde as pessoas ainda fazem seus próprios sites Also posted on IndieNews